Graham Elliot’s first restaurant job in Texas was at the Mansion on Turtle Creek, working the line under Dean Fearing before either of them had a television deal to their name. More than two decades later, Elliot is coming back to Dallas with his own name behind the reservation book, bringing Fort Worth-based Far Out Hospitality across the Trinity River for the first time since he joined the company two years ago.
Elliot built his reputation in Chicago long before most people knew him as a judge on MasterChef or, later, Top Chef. At 27 he became the youngest chef in the city to earn four stars from a major publication, and his flagship restaurant, Graham Elliot, went on to hold two Michelin stars, one of only a handful of restaurants in Chicago ever to manage that. He’s picked up three James Beard nominations along the way and spent a decade sitting beside Gordon Ramsay on MasterChef before moving to Bravo’s Top Chef panel.
In Texas, Elliot has spent the last two years as executive chef partner at Far Out Hospitality, the Fort Worth restaurant group founded by Felipe Armenta, reworking menus across all eleven of the company’s concepts and building new ones from scratch. His clearest mark on the group is Le Margot, the French bistro that Texas Monthly ranked the No. 2 Best New Restaurant in Texas for 2024, and Cowboy Prime, the steakhouse he helped shape in Midland that’s now expanding to a second Fort Worth location at 9300 Team Ranch Road.
The Dallas move centers on Pacific Table, Far Out’s seafood concept, which already runs locations in Fort Worth and Southlake with sushi flown in daily from Hawaii and a raw bar built around the kind of ingredient cost most restaurants can’t justify, stone crab claws running the kitchen close to $30 a pound on a good week. A fourth Pacific Table is now planned inside a new downtown Dallas apartment tower at 405 N. Ervay St., which puts Elliot’s cooking in front of a Dallas audience for the first time under his own name rather than as a guest chef passing through.
He isn’t arriving alone. Fellow Tarrant County chef Carla Pellegrino, known for her Las Vegas restaurant work, is keeping her Teatro location in Grapevine while opening an as-yet-unnamed Italian restaurant in Victory Park, and Arlington pitmaster Brandon Hurtado just announced a fourth Hurtado Barbecue location downtown at 900 S. Harwood St. Three Tarrant County names, three separate Dallas openings, all landing around the same stretch of time, which makes this less a single restaurant opening and more a real signal about which direction Fort Worth’s better-known chefs think the growth is heading.
